Deep Linking

Using NATS, you can use deep linking to direct your visitors to specific models, the join page directly or any page on your site.

Linking to the Join Page

Affiliates can link directly to a pre-join page by appending /join to a linkcode. For example:

https://linkdomain/track/MjozOjE/join

Linking to Specific Pages

Affiliates can link to any other page on your site by appending a forward slash and a relative URL to the link code. For example, using the following linkcode to link to a custom template you've named tour1:

https://join.example.com/track/MjozOjE/tour1.html

Manipulating the Query String

Affiliates can manipulate the query string too. For example, affiliates can pass the variable, extra_var=1234 to a tour by appending a question mark and the variable assignment to their linkcode:

https://join.example.com/track/MjozOjE/?extra_var=1234 

Deep Linking Without Affecting the Path

If you do not wish to have deep linking affect the path being used by the destination site, you can add a question mark to the end of the URL for the site.

For example, if you have a tour sending users to the following location:

https://join.example.com/track/MjozOjE/tour1.html

If you do not want https://example.com/tour1.html to be the destination, you would setup your URL for the tour as:

https://example.com/?

This will instead append path=tour.html to the URL and will not add the /tour1.html to the path.

Display Joinlinks for Ad Tools

To add a direct join page link code internally -- available for an affiliate who visits the link codes page -- You will need to do the following:

Make a slight modification to a template 'function_display_adtools'. You can find this template by going into the skins and templates admin and clicking the "Edit Templates" action icon for the desired skin. On the next page scroll down until you find 'function_list_linkcodes' and click on edit.

Once in this template, look for the comment:

 {* Display Linkcode *} 

This is the block NATS uses to display the linkcode. The actual line that displays the linkcode is this:

 <td abbr="{$tourlink[0][0][0]}" class="tab-column col_1 left-align"><input type="text" value='{if $usr.unencoded >= 10}<a href="{$tourlink[0][0][0]}">{$sites[$siteid]}</a>{else}{$tourlink[0][0][0]}{/if}' class="display-link-text"></td> 

What you can do is just add a /join after the variable {$tourlink[0][0][0]}. So if you do that, the above block will then look like this:

 <td abbr="{$tourlink[0][0][0]}" class="tab-column col_1 left-align"><input type="text" value='{if $usr.unencoded >= 10}<a href="{$tourlink[0][0][0]}">{$sites[$siteid]}</a>{else}{$tourlink[0][0][0]}/join{/if}' class="display-link-text"></td> 

This will replace your normal linkcode with one that has /join at the end. You can also modify this block to be a new row that includes both the normal linkcode and the deeplinked linkcode.